Thursday, March 27, 2008

Her interesting approach to of explaining her marketing as "nomadic grazing" has even more application than she knows. Let's draw on my expertise as a farmer for a bit (now it's not all cow manure, so bear with me...)

Managed grazing is all the rage right now. It turns out that if you leave your cattle in just a piece of a pasture - enough to allow them to graze for about 3 or 4 days, they will actually just eat that amount and get used to moving every few days to fresh, high pasture. You actually can get about 60-70 percent more grazing from this method. Means you have to organize for it, and have other things like water and salt/minerals available, but it actually is better for the cows and gives you more exercise.

As a metaphor for marketing, you can say that you have certain niches which are your pastures. Say you are into self help (like me). Now you have one pasture which is, say, Law of Attraction. Another would be money. Another would be health. Another would be success. Another might be personal efficiency. Each one of these could be broken down into smaller sub-pastures. (Health has diet, fitness, wellness, insurance, etc.) You could blog on one sub-topic each week, moving to a different topic in the same genre every month. And your audience then gets more well-rounded, plus is able to get different data on various subjects which are useful to them. People love diversity.

This metaphor also has everything to do with your sales funnel. Say you've moved a client (person or corporation) from the bottom to the top of your funnel in a certain area. Now, start them over at the bottom in a new area. A company might have worked over improving the health education of their individual staff, up to the point that they shipped several off to a pricey seminar you held on the subject. Now start them over with personal efficiency. Once you've gotten them to buy everything you have in that subject, start them in on a new one, such as success goals. You can see that each of these will affect the bottom line of that company, and so will pay for their investment in your work.

You want to manage your own grazing, your own personal output - and you want to manage your clients' grazing. Both of you get fat and happy, both of you are expanding your income and success levels.

So be nomadic. If this method has allowed tribes to survive for thousands of years on this planet, there must be something to it...

The inevitable truth, though, is that marketing your content to new audiences takes time — probably several hours a week, in fact. This is time not everyone feels they have. My advice, and what I intend on doing myself, is to subtract the needed time from my inward looking strategies and focus it once again on reaching out. You might write one less post per week on your own blog and write a guest-post somewhere else instead, for example.Never forget to look outwards * By guest-posting on popular blogs or well targeted blogs. * By writing list posts designed to please social media and your existing audience. * By asking for social media votes from friends and contacts. Let’s face it — social media is not as organic as it used to be. * By pitching links to your content at other blogs and websites in your niche. * By becoming genuinely involved and active in the social media service you’re most likely to be successful with.